iStat Menus Does it Do Anything?

The app collects a large amount of information from a large number of sources and puts them before you in a convenient format. It allows you to monitor many of your computer systems, and can be helpful in troubleshooting problems if they occur.

 

It's like in an automobile. All you really need for gauges are a speedometer and a fuel gauge. However you could also have a tachometer, engine water and oil temperatures, exhaust temperature, manifold vacuum, oil pressure, battery voltage, ... iStat Menus is just a collection of extra gauges.

 

Some users may want to use iStat menus to monitor internal temperatures or fan speed. The iStat menu app will not only show those, but can give other details about system load and memory use. All of those can be used to give you an idea about a cause of problems that users might have.
Your particular screen shot shows no issues that are important, but you could change that to show memory usage, or temperature information, etc.
And, you can monitor all of that at once, leaving it on the screen, so you can (for example) see very easily that the new app that you just installed (for editing videos, again for example) takes almost all of your memory just to run, and makes your Mac heat up very quickly, and you end up hearing the cooling fans running at full speed. And, after checking in iStat menus - you can tell why that's happening. Quitting that app may quickly cause the temperatures drop, and fans slow back to the normal low hum, and life is good - because your Mac is responding normally…
If you have no questions, or you are not having any issues with performance of your Mac hardware, and your software is also working without problems, then you can certainly say that you have no need for that kind of monitoring software - and you can be comfortable about removing it forever, and moving on with your life (which you can now say is good )

 

Here's what I see in your screenshot:
Your Mac is under almost no load - not doing very much.
It's been powered on for just over 2 hours.
You may see something more important, if you leave your Mac on, and simply make it sleep when you are not actually using your Mac. You don't really need to ever shut your Mac off, if you don't need to. It can therefore be powered on for weeks, or even months at a time. You'll then see a number of different kinds information, that only accumulates after the system has been on for some long period of time.
As you use your Mac, you may find that you are only interested in a few items, such as temperature - or CPU load, or something else.

Or, you can choose to not care a whit about those things, because your Mac "just works" with no worries…. the choice is yours.

Are you having any particular problems with your new Mac? (I'm guessing about the "new" part)

iStat Menus gives you specific information, showing it in a way that makes sense to you. If you get everything you need with the Activity Monitor, then that's great!

 

It gathers all the information from Activity Monitor, and many other sources, in one, convenient display. It simply displays information that can be very helpful for a variety of functions.

It's not a big deal...it just provides information conveniently.

 

I can't list specific numbers to look for, and there's little I can tell you about which numbers should "ring alarms" for you - other than knowing what's ordinary for _your_ Mac, and seeing some number (regardless of which one) that is outside your _your_ normal values.
BUT - the most important thing to watch for, is none of those numbers, and none of those graphics. They are really all meaningless - if your Mac is performing as your expect: Dramatic slow downs, lots of the spinning mouse cursor, fans running full speed (they'll be noisy!), freezing or pauses when you can't do much of anything - generally that your Mac doesn't do things as you expect.

Are you having any problems now - or simply have questions about what is happening?
If not, enjoy using your Mac… there's probably little point to monitoring your system if you like how it works.

 

It sounds like the temps are fine. If it is reaching 50-70% then it sounds like pretty typical CPU usage for a flash container, which is to say crappy at best. I don't think you have to worry about thermal degradation of the GPU as macs, with a few exceptions, are good at keeping GPUs in check. More likely, you will eventually experience slowdowns in Safari as your memory cache keeps building.

 

My 2009 Macbook Pro generally runs in the 60 - 70 degree celcius range and occasionally gets up to 105 degrees. You system will shut itself down if it gets too hot.

So, I wouldn't sweat it.

 

That is certainly true. I use a Safari extension, ClickToFlash, which will enable html5 when it is available.
http://hoyois.github.io/safariextensions/clicktoplugin/

 

If you go to the link that was kindly provided and read and digest the material presented you may learn that this plugin is capable of sometimes replacing flash media with an html5 version. The html5 capability in Safari is unable to achieve this.

 

Well I don't use it as I can live with the heat (and have since 2009) however it is a free extension so why not try it. From what I can glean it will replace flash videos with a placeholder. You right click the placeholder to tell the plugin how to display the video ie. native flash or html5

Perhaps the person who pointed out this plugin could provide some more info on it?

 

ClickToFlash uses website-specific conversion scripts to set the default player to html5 instead of flash. It does not work for every single website, but youtube is certainly among the ones listed. Without such intervention, websites will use a flash container by default.